I glanced at Agnes to ask her if she’d turned everyone to stone finally, but a croaking sound escaped instead. Because standing beside me wasn’t the stooped, three-hundred-year-old witch-woman but a smoking hot young warrior with unnaturally red hair and emerald green eyes.
Agnes raised an eyebrow at me, and I’m pretty sure I made that croaking sound again. On my other side, Keira sighed and said something like, “Told you she wasn’t really an old woman.”
I folded my arms across my chest and snapped, “Why’d you show up at my door looking like the Crypt Keeper then?”
Agnes, who was now uncomfortably attractive, smiled at me and said, “Oh, instead I should’ve looked like this, so you could hit on me and Gunnr?”
“Yeah, well, I might have gone with you willingly.”
“Ass,” Keira muttered.
“How the hell did you get to my apartment so quickly anyway?” I asked Agnes, ignoring Keira’s on-point assessment of me. “Maybe if we could travel faster, we wouldn’t be standing in a suspiciously empty city.”
“We were already in Baton Rouge when the Sumerians went live on television,” Agnes explained. “We knew they were up to something and had been locating you heroes for a while. And I’m sure New Orleans isn’t completely empty.” But, honestly, she didn’t sound so convinced.
“Are we planning on ever finding these gods and demigods or just standing around New Orleans arguing?” Freyja asked.
“I vote for standing here and arguing,” I said.
Frey snorted and reached across the now young and gorgeous Irish war goddess and handed me a sword, to which I offered my best stupid-stare. “Do you always travel with swords?” I asked him.
“Yes.”
“What happened to the gun you told me I could have?”
Tyr reached across Keira and handed me a pistol, which I held away from my body as if he’d handed me a cobra. That was apparently my initial reaction to being handed any kind of weapon.
“Remember,” Tyr said. “Guns won’t kill a god.”
“This is ridiculous,” I objected. “If iron blades and arrow tips work, why won’t iron bullets?”
Tyr just shrugged. “I didn’t make the rules. And I’m pretty sure bullets are mostly lead anyway.”
“Well, who did make the rules? I need to have a serious talk with that guy.”
“Um… God with a capital G?” Tyr guessed.
I pretended to think about it then nodded. “Definitely need to have a talk with that guy.”
“Gavyn,” Keira scolded, “be a smartass later. We’ve come to New Orleans to prevent the entire city from being destroyed.”
I shook my head slowly and pointed to the buildings across the street. White towels and sheets hung from the windows and flapped lazily in the breeze. For the first time, I realized how empty New Orleans seemed. No traffic on the streets or pedestrians on the sidewalks, no noise at all. “The city’s already surrendered,” I said.
“No,” Keira said. “We can’t be too late. Besides, what would they have done with all the people?”
“The Sumerians want to rule them, not slaughter them,” I said. “My guess is that everyone is hiding.”
“Where are—” Yngvarr started, but an explosion uptown silenced him. A plume of gray smoke snaked into the sky, and I glanced at Agnes to see if she’d lead us into battle. But nobody moved. After a few seconds, I hissed, “I was only kidding before. We’re seriously not going to do anything? Why are we even here then?”
Agnes pointed her sword to the gray smoke. “It’s a trap. They know we’re here.”
“And they probably know reinforcements are arriving as well,” a new voice said behind me.
He startled me, so I spun around and found myself staring at a beast of a man with a Mjollnir pendant again. And this time, he did hold a hammer with a short handle in his right hand. I jutted my chin toward it and asked, “How exactly is a hammer going to help when someone’s shooting arrows at you?”
“I have a feeling you’ll find out soon enough,” he answered.
“Can you really control lightning?” I asked. “And can you spin that hammer around and fly like Marvel’s Thor?”
He blinked at me and slowly raised his hand to show me it was just a hammer. “I’ll work on the flying thing though.”
I nodded and told him, “Good, because Keira refuses to share her flying horses.”
Two beautiful goddesses, who looked identical to Agnes, had arrived with Thor, along with the group of heroes that had been training in Iceland with me. Agnes gripped her sword and took a deep breath. “We have an entire city to search. Divide up, but don’t try saving everyone alone.”
Keira and Tyr nudged me, and my feet began moving as if they didn’t need my permission to walk. Part of my brain kept screaming at me that I should be terrified, but for some reason, I wasn’t. I was angry, and I wanted revenge for all of the lives this group had already taken and all the lives they’d likely take if we didn’t stop them soon.
We’d only gone twelve blocks when I heard footsteps behind us. I spun around just in time to parry the blade of some asshole’s sword as it sliced toward me. I retreated to get out of his reach, but he advanced on me so quickly, I lost my balance and ended up having to deflect another attempt to separate me from my head. He lunged, and I sidestepped his attack, and for the first time, I noticed Keira, Yngvarr, and Tyr were all engaged with their own problems. A spritely woman with short brown hair darted around the giant of a god like a fairy flitting around a dazed ogre. Someone, whose features I couldn’t see in my peripheral vision, was trying to stab Yngvarr with a spear. And a large man with coppery skin was forcing Keira to retreat into an alley, where she’d have no escape.
My breath caught in my lungs, and I pivoted toward the demigod who’d attacked me, the tip of my blade making contact with his chest. His dark green shirt opened and a dark, wet stain spread across the gash. But it was no longer just my feet moving as if a puppeteer had taken over my body. I thrust, driving my blade into the demigod’s heart, then yanked it free. I didn’t have time to process that I’d just killed someone. Keira needed me.
I ran into the alley, and the demigod turned on me, giving Keira a chance to attack him from behind. Tyr yelled at the surprisingly vicious little fairy, but by the time I stepped onto the sidewalk again, she lay dead in the street. Yngvarr finally knocked the spear from the man’s hands and stabbed his opponent. Now that I didn’t have some asshole trying to decapitate me, I could see the guy Yngvarr had been fighting, short with a fox-like face and small, beady eyes that narrowed into slits as he fell helplessly to the pavement.
The entire battle, while it had seemed interminably long while being fought, had taken less than a minute.
I glanced at the lifeless body of the man I’d killed then at my bloody sword, and as the adrenaline wore off, I felt nauseated. I leaned against the brick wall of the building next to this guy’s body, and closed my eyes.
“Gavyn,” Keira said quietly. “We need to keep searching for Ninurta and the other gods.”
“This is insane,” I murmured. “A week ago, I was drinking beer and watching football and waiting tables. I just killed someone.”
“He was trying to kill you,” Tyr pointed out.
“Exactly!” I shouted, and both Keira and Tyr tried to shush me, but I wouldn’t be silenced. Not now. Not when my entire world was threatening to explode in a fiery rage. “People I’ve never even met shouldn’t be trying to kill me! And over what? A few bruised egos? Your kind made this mess. You should clean it up. I’m going home.”
I threw the sword onto the ground, and as the metallic clanking faded, the sky lit up in a dazzling display of fluorescent colors. We gaped at the sky, and I wondered aloud what the hell they were doing now. Perhaps what happened next was completely and utterly my fault—I had been born, after all. I was the demigod these Sumerians feared most.
The bright colors took the form of a rectangular screen
and letters appeared, greens and oranges and pinks that spelled out, “SUBMIT.”
And then, a picture of a bruised and gagged hostage replaced the single word in the sky, but not just any hostage.
They’d taken my father.
Chapter Eighteen
Keira gasped and Tyr bent down to pick up my sword, holding it out to me wordlessly. Yngvarr carefully approached me and asked, “You know him?”
“My father,” I breathed. The world was spinning, but I was standing still. How had I not fallen yet? “I have to surrender. I have to find him—”
“Gavyn,” Keira interrupted, “you can’t surrender to them. We’ll find your father.”
“How?” I yelled. “You don’t get to decide my father’s fate.”
Yngvarr put a hand on my arm, but I shook it off and pushed myself away from the wall just as an arrow zipped past my ear, lodging into the mortar between the bricks. None of us had a bow and arrow to fire back at the archer, not that it mattered for me… I’d already demonstrated I was completely inept with one. A woman emerged from behind a tree across the street, another arrow nocked and ready to fire at me.
I swallowed, realizing how terribly thirsty I was, and dropped the sword for the second time then slowly raised my hands. My tongue felt like sandpaper as I licked my lips. “I’m going to cross the street,” I told her.
“Don’t move,” she ordered.
“I thought your bosses wanted me as a prisoner. Kinda hard to take me in if I’m not supposed to move.”
“Prisoner?” she scoffed. “We want you dead.”
Well, that wasn’t overly surprising, but it did put a crimp in my plans to exchange my life for my father’s. The only reason she hadn’t released her bowstring yet was that three supernatural people stood around me, and none of them had dropped their weapons like I had. Maybe that went a long way in proving I really was the village idiot, but in my defense, an arrow had just come within an inch of turning my head into that of a life-sized voodoo doll.
I thought I saw Keira’s hand moving, but it was so slight, almost imperceptible, that I assumed I’d just imagined it. At least until the silver blade was twirling past me, hurtling at the archer across the street with unnatural speed. The woman took her eyes off me long enough to try to step away from the knife Keira had thrown, and miraculously, my brain started working again and I remembered Tyr had handed me a gun. I yanked it from my waistband—which, in hindsight, was a stupid place to put it since shooting myself in the ass seemed highly likely—and fired.
I’m not sure what hit the archer first: Keira’s knife or my bullet. But her body collapsed, punctured by both projectiles, and Yngvarr grabbed my arm again. “If there was any question whether or not you should surrender, this should answer it. Even if you try to submit to them, they have no intention of allowing you or your father to live. Our only option is to try to rescue him.”
He was right, of course, but I loved my father more than anything, maybe even more than everything and everyone else in my life combined. He’d earned my unending admiration as he cared for his dying wife, my unyielding gratitude as he comforted a grieving son even though his own heart had broken, and even my reluctant respect as he encouraged me to try harder in college and insisted I had far too much potential to waste partying and chasing girls. It had probably been somewhere around my one year anniversary as a waiter at Copeland’s I realized just how right he’d been.
He wasn’t just my father; he was my hero.
“We have to rescue him,” I said weakly. “There’s no trying about this. We have to.”
“Okay, Gavyn,” he replied. “We will.”
“He’s the only leverage they have against you,” Keira added. “They’d be stupid to lose that.”
I ran my fingers through my hair and exhaled heavily. “How do we even start?”
Tyr picked up my sword—again—and handed it to me then tugged on the arrow to free it from the wall. My mouth dropped open as he held it to his nose and sniffed it like a bloodhound. And it’s not like I could keep my mouth shut after that. “So… which way, Lassie?”
Tyr blinked at me then used the arrow to point down the street, the same direction from which we’d just come. I glanced at Yngvarr and whispered, “Is that a god thing? Can I get a bionic nose?”
“He doesn’t have a bionic nose,” Keira argued.
“He does, however, have a bionic hand,” Yngvarr added.
“How is this helping to get Gavyn’s father back?” Tyr asked.
“Because if I can get Superman body parts, we can find him so much faster.” I paused to wink at Keira and added, “And I know exactly what body part to upgrade first.”
“Um…” Yngvarr said. “You realize that makes you sound… inadequate, right?”
I squinted at him and for good measure, squinted at Keira, too. “I was going to say hearing, you pervs.”
That was a total lie, and they both knew it.
Tyr sighed and placed his large hands on my shoulders then turned me around. “Walk,” he ordered. “We aren’t going to find your father standing around discussing bionic body parts.”
And because it was my father we were trying to save, I obeyed without even making a smartass comment. When we reached the intersection of Poydras Street and Loyola Avenue, Tyr held up a hand to stop us, and our supernatural caravan piled up behind him. Even though there was no traffic on the streets, he looked both ways then straight ahead again, but still didn’t move.
“Should we flip a coin?” I finally asked.
Tyr shook his head. “There are… signals coming from everywhere.”
Signals? I shot Yngvarr an expectant look, but he just shrugged. Apparently, he had no idea what these “signals” were either. I gave up. “Bat signals? Dog whistles?” I shot him a strange look and whispered, “Are you part wolf?”
Tyr grunted at me, and Keira hissed, “Gavyn! You remember the story about how he lost his hand, don’t you?”
I glanced down at his bionic hand then shot him a sheepish grin. “Ah… maybe it’s like the radioactive spider that bit Peter Parker. Did that wolf turn you into some sort of super-god?”
“Sometimes I have a hard time remembering why I actually like you,” Tyr said.
I nodded in complete agreement, but Keira sighed loudly and insisted we shut up and choose a direction to keep walking. Tyr tapped his chin for a few moments then adopted a decisive look and pointed to his right. “This way on Loyola.”
“What signal is telling you this is the right way?” I asked.
Keira elbowed me and told me to walk, so I yelped like she’d broken my ribs but no one bothered to ensure I’d survive so I gave up and followed them. Every building we passed had a white cloth dangling from a window or fastened to a door, but nobody ever peeked through blinds or moved a curtain out of the way to watch the odd group of people carrying swords sauntering down their street. Nobody stirred at all.
I finally stopped and turned in a slow circle, murmuring, “Where is everyone? There aren’t many places to hide in New Orleans. No basements.”
Yngvarr backtracked to join me and nodded slowly. “I’ve been thinking the same thing. I don’t think anyone’s actually inside these buildings even though someone had to be there to hang the white flags.”
Tyr scratched the back of his neck and looked thoughtfully at the closest business then shrugged. “I’ll go check.”
“Not alone,” Keira immediately protested. “We’ll all go.”
By the way we stepped across the sidewalk leading to the attorney’s office, it must’ve seemed like we thought landmines were under our feet. But truthfully, we were just that freaked out by the emptiness and silence of this city. As Tyr stepped onto the porch and reached for the door handle, I even held my breath, waiting for something to happen. I’m not sure what. An explosion? A gunshot? That wolf to leap out and finish him off?
Tyr pushed on the door, but it didn’t budge. He glanced over his shoulder at us
and grinned. “Locked.”
“Break it open,” Yngvarr whispered.
“Why are you whispering?” I whispered back.
“Don’t know,” he continued to whisper. “Seems like we should be, doesn’t it?”
I nodded solemnly. “If ever an occasion called for whispering, this would be it.”
“Would you two shut up about whispering?” Keira snapped.
Tyr stopped blinking at us then turned back to the door. The handle broke off in his huge hand, and he pushed again. This time, the door swung open, revealing an empty waiting area.
“Well, that was anti-climactic,” I whispered to Yngvarr, who nodded solemnly and, in a whisper, told me, “Totally.”
Keira pushed us both forward, and I stumbled but steadied myself on the war god who’d also stumbled but steadied himself on the banister of the porch steps. I glared at Keira and said, “You’re mean.”
“Have you really forgotten already that we’re supposed to be looking for your father?” she demanded.
“Of course not,” I said. “Being a smartass right now is the only thing keeping me sane.”
Her features softened a little and she jutted her chin toward the empty room in front of us. “Let’s just see what Tyr’s up to then we’ll resume our search.”
“What is he up to?” I asked. “What are these signals?”
Yngvarr shook his head. “No idea. All gods have different senses though… kinda like Odin always knows if you’re lying.”
“Damn it,” I sighed. “I am so screwed if I ever meet that guy again.”
We’d just stepped inside when Tyr’s large frame came bounding down the stairs. “No one upstairs. I’m starting to think people aren’t hiding but have actually disappeared.”
“An entire city?” Keira breathed. “Where would they have put everyone?”
My anger roiled inside me and I stomped back onto the porch and pulled the white blouse they’d used as a flag off the door. “They did what they were told to do! Those bastards lied!”
“Technically,” Tyr said carefully, “Inanna only promised they’d live, not that they could remain here.”
Sword of Secrets Page 18
